TWO FIGHTING TRIBES OF THE SUDAN
BY MERIAN C. COOPER; PHOTOGRAPHS BY
ERNEST B. SCHOEDSACK
CO-AUTHORS Op "THE WARFARE OF THE JUNGLE FOLK," IN THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE
IT IS not so long ago-indeed, Presi
dent Hoover had already reached man
hood and had become a mining engi
neer and ex-President Coolidge was an
active young lawyer-since a great section
of North Africa, the Sudan, was cut off
from all civilized mankind. To the West
ern World, what was taking place within
the wide borders of this land was almost
unknown. All that men knew was that
somewhere in the heart of these vast
sweeps of desert ruled the Mahdi's suc
cessor, a savage, fanatical warrior leader
called the Khalifa, who had declared war
against all the enemies of his faith.
And behind the Khalifa to battle rode
the great fighting tribes of the Sudan, men
almost unequaled in modern history for
sheer brute fighting courage; almost un
equaled for savagery also; for they made
a shambles of the Sudan. In the seven
teen years from 1882 to 1899 more than
six million people are said to have been
the victims of the dervish rule.
War, famine, disease, and more war.
Life was cheap; death or mutilation was
the punishment for those who even whis
pered disobedience to the rule of the Kha
lifa. IHe lived only for power-power
absolute, the power of conquest.
"Kill! Kill!" was the order he gave to
his emirs, until from the borders of the
Red Sea to the great western deserts and
from northern Egypt to the jungles of the
upper Nile, 1,500 miles south, there raged
such a storm of savage military might as
even Africa had rarely known.
ALL WHITE MEN WERE SLAVES OR
PRISONERS
In all this vast dervish empire were only
a half dozen or so white men, and these
men were slaves and prisoners.
All that
the civilized world knew of their existence
was that occasionally across the mysteri
ous borders of the Sudan there escaped
some black man bearing, at the risk of his
life, a tortured plea for aid. And the
nations of Europe were powerless to help
these miserable prisoners, for rather than
permit a "Christian dog" to enter the do
main of the Khalifa a hundred thousand
warriors stood ready to die.
AN AMAZING CHANGE TAKES PLACE IN
30 YEARS
That was just a little more than thirty
years ago.
Yet one night, not many months ago, I
sat beside a candle-lighted table, under the
stars, in the open courtyard of a thatched
roofed, single-story house of a little Afri
can village. Across from me, by the dim
candlelight, I could just make out the
white face of a young man in his late
twenties. The place was Abu Zabad, some
300 miles, as the crow flies, from the
Sudan capital, Khartoum, where Gordon
died on dervish spears, and more than Ioo
miles from the nearest whites, at El Obeid.
The young man was Mr. Blackley, a Brit
isher, who, although he lived there alone,
with only a handful of native police, was,
under the title of Assistant District Com
missioner, the real ruler of a huge slice of
that savage, all-conquering, defiant der
vish empire of thirty years ago.
This night there were present two other
white men, rare visitors in this lonely
spot: a young Scotch captain of the native
Camel Corps, out on a 500-mile trek with
his men, and a doctor. As I sat and lis
tened to them, it was hard to realize that
the millions of wild men who inhabit this
great, savage Sudan are ruled to-day by a
few score of just such young Englishmen
as these who joked with each other so
casually; and that these young English
men, somehow, though they lived alone
and practically unprotected, were absolute
masters and governors of all.
How do they manage it?
I thought: First came Kitchener's great
march-the complete defeat of the dervish
army near Omdurman. Then, after this,
came the British administrators. Cour
age, unshaken belief in their race and their
caste, and rigid, absolute, unswerving,
impeccable justice have given to these
administrators this mastery over the war-